Hao Nguyen
We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of Django Girls RDU, a group in NC’s Triangle region that hosts free one-day Django coding workshops for women. Django Girls is part of an international movement that’s helped 1,600 (and counting!) women learn how to code.
We originally got involved with Django Girls at the impetus of our Technical Director, Mark Lavin. While discussing our efforts to support women in tech, Mark was emphatic: there was this group, Django Girls, that was doing extraordinary work engaging women in Django. Clearly, we needed something like that locally. Luckily for us, Django Girls was coming to PyCon and we'd get to see first hand just how wonderful they are.
Four of our team members volunteered as coaches for a Django Girls workshop during PyCon 2015. There was nothing quite like seeing the impact Django Girls had on each attendee. The environment was warm and friendly. The tutorials for students, coaches, and organizers, were detailed and extremely well thought out. The passion of the Django Girls organizers was simply infectious. Out of a desire to prolong this excitement and share it with everyone we knew, we put together a team and applied to have a Django Girls RDU chapter. We’re honored to partner with such a wonderful group!
The first workshop will be on October 3rd, applications are due September 4th. We have five great coaches from Caktus and PyLadies RDU and each coach will work one-on-one with three students to build their first Django website, a blog. We’re looking for volunteers to coach and sponsor the workshop. Each additional coach means three more students we can accept. If you’d like to get involved, please email us at durham@djangogirls.org. And, of course, we’re also looking for women who want to learn how to code.
Not able to make the October 3rd meetup? You'll also find members of our team coaching at DjangoCon's Django Girls Austin. To learn about more Django Girl activities, please follow us @djangogirlsRDU or visit the DjangoGirls website.
